Harikleia Papapostolou - Personal Painting Exhibition

Colour is in motion, creates abstract forms that also seem moving, flowing and at the same time frozen being simultaneously in dialogue and transformation.

Light, shiny colours like light bulbs in rows accentuate the volumes to turn each picture into a lively phantasmagoric, almost festive event. Through accentuation and shadings, the darkness enters a third dimension and becomes an autonomous form.

The viewer’s eye is soon familiarized with the pictorial world of these paintings, abandons the subtractive dimension and attempts tracing similarities. Like images from the Sun or the Earth, or images of hearts, all pictures shine in vibrant colour volumes releasing dynamism and energy. They look like living cells emerging from a subtractive environment just as order from chaos, a form from confusion.

Symbolisms, extensions of sentiments and signs are surfacing reasonably in this phase. One wonders if the central theme of the paintings is not an abstract chord but vibration, creation and life itself. This painter does not wish to give us clear answers. Instead she seems balancing between guileless, most powerful colours and the symbolisms of a traceable form, at the same time adding an extra dimension and “reading” to her paintings.

The viewer feels comfortable with this aesthetic approach, but at the same time is able to explore logical interpretational orbits that would explain the painter’s “vocabulary”, such as the fauve colour of Spyro Papaloukas and the nabis behind it, or the dynamic paintings of the American expressionism.

Irascible painting? Lyric subtraction? Papapostolou seems to balance all of these foundations not intellectually but by living or “inhabiting” each painting and with a process of successive interventions so as to conquer the final tranquility of the forms after a thunderstorm of colour and light which move the forms as if they were vibrating yet not exploding machines.

Paintings absorbed in reverie, they carry the viewer’s eye to those small esoteric labyrinths; and after transmitting the adventures of the wondering eyes they grant a final sense of well-organized machinery that vibrates in rhythm and in optimism, endlessly.